Moving In, Moving On
by CherryBerry12
Summary: Karin has never really belonged anywhere, and being stranded in Konoha doesn't exactly change that. Itachi has never intended to reconcile with Sasuke, and being kept alive against his will doesn't exactly change that, either. Itachi/Karin. Minor Naruto/Sasuke.
1. Prologue

**AN: **Thanks to whoever pointed out the formatting issue on this chapter! I went back and editing a few things recently, and I think I must have fumbled something.

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It takes Karin and Sasuke's friend Naruto almost half an hour to walk to Itachi's house from the interrogation cell where she's been waiting. They make their way through woods that grow more and more dense the further they go, tall, pillar-like trees crowding in further along the rough path they've been walking. Karin glances up once and can barely make out the sky through the canopy, boxed in by the weave of branches.

Naruto, in all his excitement, doesn't seem to notice.

"I guess this makes us friends now!" he had said when they left the ANBU building, apparently forgetting the past weeks where he'd ignored her existence entirely. He'd thrown one unexpectedly muscular arm around her shoulders like they'd known each other forever and the Konoha shinobi standing nearby had turned to squint at them, looking Karin up and down as if she was some kind of threat. "Since you're Sasuke's friend and all!"

Karin doesn't think Sasuke would exactly agree with that assessment, but it's only one more thing Naruto doesn't seem to notice.

Naruto has all the energy of a hurricane and his whirlwind thoughts fly haphazardly between them as they walk, filling the silence until it's ready to burst.

"—and then Sasuke and I went to Kumo, where we met this other jinchuriki named Killer Bee!" he chatters, rambling a good half-dozen or so paces ahead of her. "And then we got him to help us track down the other Akatsuki, but then we met Madara, who wasn't really Madara but this other guy named Obito and he was actually the leader of the Akatsuki instead of Pein, but Obito was—"

His enthusiasm is suspicious but at the very least it's consistent, and Karin prefers it a hell of a lot more to the three-way awkward silence that settled between her, Itachi, and Sasuke while they been waiting to hear how exactly Konoha planned to handle their combined fates; they're all technically missing-nin at this point but it doesn't quite shake out the same way between them all.

Sasuke's the hero of a war that managed to pass by without either Itachi or Karin so much as hearing about it, fighting his way across the continent while the two of them were holed up in one of Orochimaru's old hideouts.

The choice to stay with Itachi wasn't exactly hers to make, but after spending the last months stuck alone with him, Karin is certain she would've preferred the war, alien goddesses and undead shinobi and all.

A whole war went by and she is, after all, still nobody: at the end of it all, she's still just the random girl Sasuke brought home so he could keep his brother from dying somewhere along the trip from Oto to Konoha.

As for Itachi—well. Karin still isn't entirely sure what she's supposed to make of him.

Out of the three of them, Sasuke is the only one who still tries to talk, but what passes for talking in their lonely little cell are rare, open-ended, intentionally vague questions Sasuke exclusively aims at Itachi: _why did you—_ or_ that one time, when you—_ breaking the silence every few hours.

Itachi never answers him, keeps to his steely, pissy silence, but when Naruto showed up to report he and someone named Yamato had finished building a house where he could stay, Itachi had turned to Karin and said, _Perhaps you might wish to visit before deciding to stay with me._

_… You invited Karin?_

Like all of Sasuke's questions, Itachi had ignored that one too, but Sasuke has never been someone who would give up that easy._ Why the hell would you want Karin, of all people—_

Karin, _of all people_, wasn't going to stick around to be insulted in a conversation she wasn't even a part of, and so she had scrambled to her feet and waited for Naruto to let her out, one narrowed, lilac eye burning a hole in her back.

_Itachi, what could you possibly—_

Karin was at just as much of a loss as Sasuke was, but she already knew if Itachi answered at all, it'd just be another lie.

_Get me the hell out of here before they try to kill each other again_, she'd snapped as Naruto fumbled with the cell door one of their dumbass guards must have decided to lock.

Naruto had been firm about it: none of them were prisoners, they were just… better contained in a cell.

It wasn't like a flimsy door lock could keep Sasuke in if he really wanted out, either.

So, even if she hasn't been able to get a single word in since she and Naruto left the ANBU building, Karin appreciates the freedom anyway, because it's been days since she's been able to move comfortably, to walk further than the dimensions of their cell, and her knees ache as she jogs after Naruto, who doesn't so much run as skip, jump, and throw his hands up in all manner of expressions, picking up his pace the closer they get.

It would be hard to lose track of him, though, because his sunflower-sunshine chakra is everywhere, radiating off of his body in surges that would've probably killed an ordinary person by now.

There's—there's something else in it too, but it's cold, buried deep in his chakra, and Karin isn't particularly eager to figure out what it is.

"This is it!" Naruto calls back to her as he stops a couple dozen feet ahead of her, waiting in the middle of nowhere. Karin hurries on ahead to catch up to him, and gets her first good look at the house.

It's… Well, it's not much, but she didn't expect a whole lot.

The trees are no less dense here, and their branches wrap around the perimeter of the house in a way that already has Karin anxious for their first serious storm.

It's only a single-story, and Naruto tells Karin gleefully that it was built (with his help, of course) in a single day, _yesterday_. It's made from a chakra release she's only ever heard about in legends, a power strong enough to tame demons but apparently convenient enough to build houses for former criminals, too.

There are a few crooked, hastily-poured concrete stairs stacked under what might as well be the front door, a single narrow window posted next to it. Karin closes her eyes and senses that, aside from Naruto, the closest person is almost half an hour away and they're on the move, the distance growing every second.

It's probably for the best.

Naruto puts his hands on his hips, grinning at her so hard it probably hurts his face. "And now it's all yours!" Except it's really not, and she's only there until, inevitably, Sasuke's brother gets tired of her too and gives her the boot.

Karin doesn't bother responding, and Naruto's grin evens out, tucks itself away for later when he sees Sasuke again.

The steps are firmer under her feet than she expected them to be, and Karin slips inside the house and Naruto follows close behind. "Yamato-sensei did a pretty good job, I think. He's made a whole lot of houses in his lifetime, so he had a pretty good idea of what to do."

She runs her hand along the door frame, skims her fingers over the walls, and feels a busy thrum of chakra within it, as if the wood itself were somehow alive. As if it had its own life force. The texture is glassy smooth, as if it had been sanded down and varnished, but something like that just doesn't happen in a day.

It's disconcerting.

Karin's sensing is an integral part of her, something she can't silence, and when she kicks off her sandals the house hums under the soles of her feet, can't help but demand her attention. Shuffling over the floor, she moves through heavy clouds of lingering mokuton, a fresh-grass scent that tickles her nose and trails after her as she walks.

It calls out to her, though, tugging at her senses as clearly as if whispers of _Karin_ were rising up from the floorboards, leafy tendrils rising to catch her ankles as she walks.

It's something, she decides then, that she'll just have to learn to ignore.

Naruto gives her a tour that lasts a few minutes at best. He's fidgety now, rocking back and forth on his heels every time Karin stops to look at something, sneaking looks out the front window while she runs her hands over the few sturdy tables and chairs that are scattered around, not organized in any particular way. Under his excitement he's clearly impatient to head back to the village, back to where Itachi and Sasuke are waiting to get their final orders from the Hokage.

Karin supposes she isn't important enough these days that she'd even need to be there; there's nothing the Hokage would need to say to her that couldn't be passed along through Sasuke, if he cared to listen. Or Itachi, if he'd still condescend to speak to her.

Luckily for Naruto, who's becoming more anxious with every passing second, it doesn't take very long to show someone a back porch, a living room, and a kitchen.

A single bedroom.

A single bed.

Karin closes the bedroom door behind her carefully, and decides that's another problem she's not quite ready to think through.

Itachi's house is a shell of a house, only complete in the sense that Karin doubts whoever made it has any interest in coming back to add a few square-feet to it.

There's gutted-looking space off from the bedroom that's more of a closet, but Naruto swears he can turn it into a bathroom, he just needs to get some pipes, find a tub somewhere, and there must be something in the air in Konoha because Karin finds herself believing that it's absolutely something Naruto can accomplish. Something he _will_ accomplish.

She stares for a long time at a square gap in the kitchen counter before Naruto hurriedly promises they can fix it, that his and Sasuke's first new mission together will be putting in a sink and making the house habitable, _tomorrow_.

He throws another glance towards the front door when he pretends to adjust his headband, and Karin wonders if he might just leave her there if she takes any longer.

"But yeah," Naruto starts, shuffling towards the door. "I hope you don't mind the whole bedroom thing, but you can probably work something out between the two of you? Yamato-sensei just assumed Itachi would be here by himself so…"

"It's fine," Karin finally says, taking one last glance around the interior. Some tables, some chairs, and nothing else. All of it's bare: bare walls, bare tabletops, bare floors. Even the wood itself is bare, no discolorations or gradients in any of it, pure brown from the ceiling to the floorboards. Karin sighs and turns towards the door and isn't even surprised by the very obvious relief that's plastered across Naruto's face. "I don't really care."

She's survived worse, after all.

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**AN:**

I had to try so hard not to just have "itachi is that bird who's bad at math" as my summary. But that's it, that's the whole fic. Itachi is the bird, and he's bad at math.

Thanks to everyone who reads, reviews, and favorites!


	2. Bonds

**AN: Hello! This is a longer chapter, but I really wanted to take the time to give some explanation for what happened in time leading up to present. Some of it isn't going to be filled in entirely, but we'll get there! **

**Enjoy!**

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The front door clicks shut behind her, and Karin's hands linger on the handle. It's a firm door, heavier than she would expect it to be just from looking at it, but she realizes there's no lock on it. Nothing to stop anyone else from trying to get in.

It couldn't have been hard to make one in the first place: maybe a few screws here, a bolt there—but how could someone just forget? The people in Konoha locked their own doors, didn't they?

The entrance to Konoha, their ANBU cells—those all had locks, had seals. Ways to keep people out—and to keep them in.

Karin absolutely does not freak out about it. She should, because freaking out is how she can get people to listen to her, and how she can get things done. It's also how she'll get herself marked as a nuisance, an annoyance, and so she buries those worries and leaves the door behind her.

"Everything okay?" Naruto asks, again rocking back and forth on his heels, hands tucked into his pockets. He's still trying to hurry her—Karin has no idea how he got stuck with escort duty, but there's almost definitely a limit to how much of his time she can waste.

"It's fine," she says, for what feels like the fifth or sixth time that day. "Don't worry about it."

Naruto's face scrunches. It's more confused than angry, though for someone as well-respected as Naruto seems to be, he looks confused far more often than not. "Is it about Itachi? Cause if you need someone to rough him up a bit—I'm your guy." His face breaks out into another grin, making an easy joke out of fighting one of his village's most infamous shinobi. Anything, to a shinobi like him, could be a joke, she supposes.

Naruto rolls up a sleeve, flexing a bit of muscle that doesn't seem nearly as impressive as he apparently thinks it is. Or, maybe he does know, and he's only trying to lighten the mood. "If he gives you any trouble at all, me and Sakura will have your back! He won't know what hit him!"

Still, as dense as he might act sometimes, Naruto is at least keen enough that he doesn't include Sasuke in his list of people willing to fight Itachi for her sake.

"Let's just go." She leaves the door shut behind her, and walks towards the planetary mass of chakra ahead of them—back to Konoha.

Naruto rolls his sleeve back down and stuffs his hands back into his pockets. "Are you sure?" He trails behind her at first, then jogs to catch up when she doesn't wait. "If there's actually a problem, I could probably talk to him about it for you."

"Even if there was, it wouldn't be your problem," she says, though not unkindly. "So you don't need to worry about it."

His smile is far too easy, far too casual. Far too kind, when he's offering it to someone he hardly knows. "Well, if you stay here, you're part of the village! And since I'm gonna be Hokage one day, it's my job to take care of you!"

There's golden honesty in his chakra, earnest enough that instead of snapping back she only ignores him. After a few moments of waiting he seems to give up and she feels his eyes turn away from her.

Naruto's friendliness is so brazen that it's uncomfortable, though it's a discomfort she's willing to endure—it's a test, she tells herself. A way of proving her worth.

Naruto shamelessly and whole-heartedly inserts himself into other people's business, but as taboo as that kind of prying might have been in her past life, Karin isn't particularly eager to scare away one of the only people who shows any sort of interest in her.

Ingratiating herself to him was self-preservation foremost, though she couldn't deny that the appeal goes much deeper than that.

Karin tugs down her shirt sleeves over her knuckles; even the air in Konoha makes her skin itch, as if her otherness were literally skin deep. There's too much chakra around the village, too much density, and the dust-like presence of it makes her want another shower. Maybe even another nap.

"That reminds me," Naruto starts, head whipping back to glance at her. He stops walking, and waits several seconds for her to catch up to him before he turns around and continues. "Sasuke and Sakura and I were gonna go get dinner after Tsunade gets everything settled. You and Itachi are both welcome to come!"

Naruto isn't lying—he rarely is. She doesn't even feel an aftertaste of a lie, not one thing to suggest he doesn't absolutely mean she's welcome. That Itachi is, somehow, welcome as well.

"I—" He seems so genuine about it that inexplicably she _does_ want to accept. How hard could it be, she wonders, to suffer through a single meal? To sit quietly while Sasuke and his friends fool around and trade small talk over her head?

She isn't a part of their team - is about as far from it as possible - but she knows she has to start somewhere. When it's the three of them together, though—she's learned there's just no way for her to sneak through, under, or between their interlocked hands.

She plays it safe, and plans an easy escape route. "I should see what Itachi plans to do."

"Oh, yeah. Sure, that makes sense."

She can't decide if it's jealousy or selfishness that makes her want to refuse. She doesn't doubt for a second that absolutely anyone would be welcome at Naruto's table, any friend, enemy, ally, or acquaintance—Naruto would invite all of them, would squeeze them all into the same corner booth or ramen stand, and that's the exact problem. Why would she want something he'd offer to anyone?

If she were Sasuke, if she were Sakura, there'd be no offer at all; Naruto would only announce their dinner plans, take her by the hand, and then it'd happen.

Whatever that is, whatever it means—it's the real thing, and Karin wants it.

"So… You and Sasuke," Karin tries, opting for slightly more familiar ground. "You two are—"

Naruto perks up again and turns to her, his grin so bright it's almost blinding, the change in his chakra so quick she's almost startled by it. "It's going to be great! I ordered a new futon last week so it should be here soon, and I had some time a few days ago so I gave the place a new paint job since, you know, we spent so much time out of the village and it was starting to look kinda sad. Um."

Even mentioning Sasuke seems to pull more light into his chakra—it's practically iridescent. For months all she'd had were dim signatures, her own aura and what lingered of Itachi's.

Naruto's, in contrast, is bright—occasionally blinding to senses well-adapted to the dark, but bright nonetheless, bright and warm and inviting.

He snickers, but his grin quickly solidifies into something a little more serious. Contemplative. "I waited… Well, three whole years to see Sasuke again after he left the village. It's taken four just to get him to come back to stay! I just wish I would've spent more time imagining it, because now that he's here, all I can think about are all the things we still have to do!"

"It's pretty clear he means a lot to you." She doesn't know what else to say to that—in a way, she almost thinks she ought to be jealous of Sasuke, jealous of the way Naruto feels about Sasuke. Or maybe the way Sasuke feels about Naruto, or the way Sakura feels about Sasuke. Or how Sasuke feels about Sakura.

Jealousy is never an entirely logical thing, but Karin thinks she should draw the line at being jealous at all three of them for their relationships with each other.

"Sasuke—it's good to finally have him home." Naruto pauses and, after a moment to think on it, turns back to her. "So you and his brother… You're pretty close then, right? I mean, you gotta be since you're living together and all."

"Ah…" Karin cringes, because she and Itachi might be a lot of things, but _close_ almost certainly isn't one of them. At best, they'll probably be able to act indifferent towards each other. "What do you mean by that?"

"You and Itachi. He, uh," Naruto pauses again, his face scrunching like he's fishing for a word or a thought. "He doesn't say a whole lot, does he? I can't really figure him out now. I didn't really expect things to be, well, _normal_ but…" He squints while he thinks on it, the whisker-marks on his face twitching. "I at least expected more than… than what it's been like."

Karin finds it hard to disagree with that.

_What it's been like_ has meant very little for everyone other than Sasuke.

Both Naruto and Sakura visited Sasuke while they waited for the Hokage to drudge through the clusterfuck between the last two members of the Uchiha Clan. Naruto was there daily—arriving early in the morning armed with a hot water bottle and plastic bag of ramen cups, cheap sleeves of wooden chopsticks wrapped in tissue paper. More often than not, they'd been forced to eat field rations the guards brought for them—silvery packets of food she could only think to describe as _edible_.

The first time Naruto attempted to feed them the ANBU guarding them had finally looked up from the magazine he'd been skimming to point at Sasuke's brother. _Wooden chopsticks are weapons. He can't have them._

_Of course he can!_ Naruto replied, already pouring steaming water into the partly-opened cups. _Itachi isn't gonna bother anyone!_

Naruto seemed to have an uncanny ability to change the minds of those around him, but apparently the forces of bureaucracy were somehow beyond his reach._ It's a policy. Either he doesn't get ramen, or someone else is gonna have to feed him._

Naturally, everyone except Itachi had immediately turned to look at her.

_You can go to hell if you think I'm gonna sit here and feed him_, she'd snapped at the guard, pointedly addressing him instead of Naruto or Sasuke. Or Itachi. _I'm not his damned nurse and he's a grown-ass man._

Itachi said nothing, but even with suppressing seals slapped across his wrists and forehead she could smell frustration in his chakra, the bitter burnt-hair smell of it rising every time the guard's eyes flickered over to him.

Naruto had scoffed._ By that logic, Sasuke shouldn't be allowed to have chopsticks either! He's easily as strong as Itachi is and he doesn't even have his chakra sealed! _

_Hey moron, maybe don't give him the idea. _

_But that's the point! If either of you really wanted to leave there'd be nothing to stop you— _

The guard eventually folded under Naruto's pleas, maybe less persuaded by goodwill than overcome with annoyance. Itachi did not, thankfully, kill anybody with his chopsticks, and made no great show of handing them back over to the guard when they were done.

Simple enough.

Sasuke's other teammate, Sakura, would turn up every other day at various times—sometimes arriving in the strange hours between midnight and sunrise, faint traces of ink or blood smeared over an eyebrow, a cheekbone, still half-dressed in her scrubs. She looked exhausted, something Karin understood very, very well.

There was something more to her, though—a contentment that Karin couldn't quite relate to, feelings of pride and satisfaction she'd never once associated with healing.

At the very least, it made Sakura more than a little interesting.

Sasuke would always wake to speak to her, and Karin made it a point to at least wave to the only other woman she regularly saw before rolling back over on her futon.

Itachi, however, would continue what he'd already been doing—pretending to sleep.

_There are still so many people hurt_, Sakura said once, pushing back dirty bangs from her forehead with her palm. There were frustrated wrinkles cracking in the corners of her eyes, but she was still unavoidably beautiful—her bright green eyes were tilted up at the ceiling, soft pink hair falling just past her shoulders._ I feel like we're never going to get our emergency room back._

_We did our part. I don't see why you're still so busy,_ Sasuke had answered, but Sakura only snorted, shaking her head. Karin couldn't help but sympathize with that—it wasn't the first time she'd seen Sasuke overestimate how much healing jutsu could do while simultaneously underestimating just how taxing it was.

You _did your part; my job isn't done until the shinobi go home. _

Working together, both Sakura and Naruto were able to visit Sasuke around the clock, smothering him with their excitement, their affection, and the warm glow of Sasuke's chakra told Karin that he was barely annoyed by it, that he only pretended to be indifferent when Naruto told (and did not ask) Sasuke about clearing out his apartment to make room for the both of them.

And Itachi said nothing.

Karin had initially tried to join them but quickly learned there was no place for her—her contributions were, at best, a few snide, bitter comments, poorly concealed attempts to vent her multitude of frustrations. At first it was cathartic to lay out them all out, to bear her wounds to anyone who'd listen to her, but it only took one sympathetic, pitying glance from Sakura to shut her up entirely.

Karin wanted to be heard. She wanted to be acknowledged, but—but not like that.

Naruto and Sakura were only there for Sasuke and it showed: she'd waited in that cell for several days before Sakura actually looked directly at her, squinted her eyes, and finally asked what her name was, why she was waiting there.

It was an fairly innocuous question, but one Karin struggled to answer. Sasuke owed her, maybe. If not a _thanks_ for all she'd done, then an apology. An acknowledgement of some kind. Suigetsu and Juugo were both long gone by that point, two other drifters who somehow had managed to catch ahold of each other and stay afloat that way, but Karin was still stranded. With no Orochimaru and no Team Hebi, she'd effectively lost everything she'd had in a span of six or seven months with nothing to show for it.

Thinking over Naruto's question, thinking over whatever her relationship to Itachi might be, Karin sighs. She wants to say there's just too much to explain, but there's also very little to tell. "He just doesn't talk. At all." She hasn't had much to say lately either, but it's wholly separate issue, not something Naruto would want to hear about. "All those months we spent together and I could barely get anything out of him."

"Yeah. I get that." Naruto turns around, but continues walking toward Konoha backwards, stepping over rocks and branches and gnarled tree roots as if he was still able to see them. "I mean, I don't _get_ that but, ah, I think I get how he is, you know, and—"

Karin waves him off. "I get it."

Another silence falls between them before Naruto pipes up again, asking, "So how long do you have to stay with him?" He cocks his head, and just over his shoulder Karin can see the village gates rising through the trees, tall enough they dwarf even the oldest, sturdiest trees. Even then she estimates they've only come about halfway, at least ten or fifteen minutes or longer until they reach the entrance.

Still, she can sense more shinobi trickling in from the woods around them in groups of three or more, the air filling with more than just a vague presence of chakra. "Just until he's better, or…?"

"Well…" Another group of shinobi joins them, popping out of the woods several yards down the path. They're younger—a group of genin, she thinks, and their jounin sensei. One is riding on another's back, arms hanging loosely around his teammate's shoulders, bandages tied loosely around his knee. The third is forming hand signs, slow enough that even Karin can follow them, but when she's done there's no jutsu—she only looks to her sensei, who shakes her head but smiles, giving her student a well-meaning pat on the shoulder.

Is that what it's like, she wonders, when you grow up in Konoha? You have teammates to tie up your injuries, a sensei to correct your jutsu? Friends and neighbors and acquaintances, an entire community to support you.

You have somewhere to go, even after your mission is done.

She squeezes her hands together and her thumb throbs. It'd bled that morning, aggravated after she'd torn a hangnail away. That was several hours ago, though, and it's still not healed completely, the skin a soft, pearly pink. She's never paid close attention to it before, but she thinks it ought to heal faster than that, that there shouldn't even be a scar of it remaining.

If only she'd stop messing with it—maybe then it'd stop bothering her. "I haven't really decided how long I wanna stay."

Karin isn't entirely sure what more there is to say because, really, she doesn't _have_ to stay there.

At the same time, though, what else is there for her to do?

Where else would she go?

She'd waited nearly half a year for Sasuke to return. She'd waited without once receiving a single visitor or message, without knowing if Sasuke was still alive or still free or, coming onto month five, if he was still planning to come back at all. She continued to wait long after her instincts told her to run—Karin's trade was information, and being stuck with Itachi, removed from any village or network, meant she was completely divorced from anything beyond her sensing.

Orochimaru was dead, Sasuke was gone, and every good impulse that'd kept her alive over the years was telling her to abandon Itachi and let Sasuke get his own revenge, to find the nearest hidden village and throw herself on their mercy, beg and grovel and scheme until they let her in.

If it had been anyone else, after all, she would've done exactly that. It'd been Sasuke, though, and so she'd stayed, and she'd waited.

She stayed and she waited and she'd done everything Sasuke had asked her to do, and yet what did she have to show for it? At the end of it all, she was stuck with him—what else could she do but continue to follow Sasuke? Even if it meant following him all the way to Konoha, into the ANBU cells—what choice did she have?

The night Sakura asked her why she was there, Sasuke had waited for Sakura to leave before he turned around and stared at her, black eye watching her for a long moment before he shrugged. Quick and casual, the type of haughty gesture she'd been long used to seeing from him.

She'd kicked her covers off and rested on her elbows. Ready to talk, if they were finally going to talk. _You want something?_

_Naruto will take you anywhere you'd want to go,_ he'd said, and of course it'd been Naruto who'd have to escort her because, hero or not, Sasuke wasn't going to be leaving the village for a long, long time. You don't have to stay here anymore. He'd inclined his head towards Itachi, who was still off in the corner, still pretending to sleep. _The med-nin here know what they're doing._

She didn't respond and Sasuke had, maybe, taken her silence for agreement; he'd never really been the type to assume otherwise. _You said there was somewhere you were going, right? At the Southern Hideout—you said you had an errand to run before we left. People you had to see._

_Yeah, I did_. She did say that. She hadn't really meant it, though.

_Well, Naruto will have some spare time while we get things worked out here. He won't mind a short mission to distract him._

_That's just stupid,_ she'd snapped back. _Obviously they're not going to be waiting anymore. You think anyone is still going to be waiting for me after almost a year? _

She wasn't like him, and maybe she never would be—there wasn't a soul on earth who'd wait for her like Konoha had waited for Sasuke. Not for seven months, and not for three years—not at all.

_Well. Whatever_. With that, he turned his back on her and shuffled back onto his cot._ As long as you're not starting trouble here._

She watched him pull back his blankets and climb into bed, and felt strangely bothered by it. In Otogakure, he'd been a god. Returning to Konoha hadn't exactly changed that about him, but something about it just didn't feel the same anymore.

_Gimme a few days to figure it out. I'll let you know. _

Sasuke and Itachi might have been traitors to Konoha, each with their own unique flavor of disloyalty, but she was an outsider. She wasn't going to get anything out of Konoha—not punishment, not gratitude, and definitely not the welcome that had been waiting for Sasuke.

A few months of being confined to the village, and then Sasuke would move on with his life, could pick right back up from where he'd left off. Unlike her, Sasuke had a home, had _always_ had a home, and even aside from Naruto and Sakura there'd been a new person stopping by every day to welcome him back: a blonde girl with long bangs who made herself comfortable on the cement floor outside the cell before not-so-politely asking Sasuke just what the _hell_ he thought he was doing when he left the village, and Sakura, behind.

A shy, quiet girl accompanied Naruto several times but did little more than smile at them, leaving gifts of boxes of sweets near the edge of the cell. They went untouched until Karin finally got up and snatched them, dropping back down onto her cot to pick out her favorites.

(_I remember you used to have a sweet tooth_, Sasuke had said to his brother, almost whimsically, though he'd gotten no answer.)

There'd been a man with a scar across his nose who'd pointedly ignored the guard's warnings and reached into the cell to touch Sasuke on the shoulder and welcome him _home, finally, home_, and Karin was almost too numbed by all the ridiculous shit she'd seen at that point to be shocked when Sasuke stood there and let the man pull him into a hug.

From the sad, brief spark of curiosity in Itachi's chakra, she wasn't the only one surprised.

All of their visitors had all come to see Sasuke, and Karin couldn't help but feel twice and three-times as forgotten when she inevitably spent these meetings kicking up dust at the back of the cell or watching Itachi watch Sasuke.

He'd become a hero—did she have any right to hate a hero? To be angry at someone who supposedly saved the world, just because he left her behind to do it?

She waited years for him to finally make good on his threat to kill Orochimaru, kept her head down and her ear to the ground as Sasuke maneuvered around Otogakure, biding his time. She waited months for him to return for Itachi, months of enduring Itachi's stony silence and murky, washed out chakra. Months of keeping Itachi alive on the odd chance Sasuke didn't feel like killing him when he returned.

And, well, Sasuke _didn't_ end up killing him, but that was almost beside the point.

Karin had every reason to take up Sasuke's offer and fuck off to some distant village, find a country where she could start over from scratch, scrounge up a new name and a new purpose and try to make something out of herself.

Sasuke seemed wary enough of her continued presence that she was certain she could bargain for more—letters of recommendation from his friends in high places, a small lump sum to go towards a house, an apartment.

He was, after all, _somebody_ when Karin was (and is) still _nobody_.

She could have pressured him and, with a little tact, weaseled some kind of repayment from Sasuke. Gotten something else out of him if he wouldn't thank her. If he didn't want her anymore.

Still, Sasuke was all she had left.

Maybe it wasn't that tie specifically that Karin wanted. Maybe she was hungry for any kind of tie, any sort of bond to cling to in the absence of everything else. She'd never been able to tie herself down to any single place: not to Kusa, which she willingly, _gleefully_, left. And not Otogakure, where Orochimaru's death came to her as more of an uneasy relief than anything else.

She didn't think it was too much to want to be tied down somewhere she wanted to stay.

.

.

.

Itachi gave her the option to live with him, but offered her no benefit beyond having a place to stay. He mentioned it one day while Sasuke and Naruto were relitigating some old dispute between the two of them, both of them gripping the cell bars tight enough to turn their knuckles white, close enough to headbutt each other, though Karin felt enough strangeness in their chakra to wonder if they were just as likely to kiss.

It was uncanny, in some ways, how his chakra and Sasuke's chakra were drawn to one another, how they attracted each other like magnets or planets or the rush of static electricity that occasionally crackled in the center of Sasuke's palm when he got bored.

It was a side of Sasuke she struggled to harmonize with the Sasuke she remembered: he and Naruto were arguing about some old mission of theirs, both accusing the other of having been the bigger chicken, both claiming they had been the one who came up with whatever harebrained strategy that ended up saving them. Karin sat and listened to them long enough to realize that, in addition to being nearly incomprehensible, it almost didn't seem to _matter_.

They were arguing over completely petty shit, and yet Karin had never seen Sasuke so animated: Naruto gave Sasuke a shit-eating grin and Sasuke turned around with a huff, shoving his hands into his pockets.

"That's definitely not how it happened, moron. I didn't need anyone to save me."

"Now come on, guys, I was there too and I remember—" Sakura was clearly used to mediating between them, elbowed her way into their conversation without waiting to be invited, without waiting for an opening.

It was one way to stake a claim, to force them to acknowledge her.

(Karin couldn't help but think of it—the myriad ways she could have inserted herself too. That she could yell at them, call them idiots. Morons. Jerks, fools, children—that she could be angry, if only just to be acknowledged.

She remembered how Sakura had looked at her before, as if Karin needed sympathy, needed _pity_, and decided to keep her words to herself.)

She waited in the back of the cell with Itachi, neither of them having much of a place in the Naruto and Sasuke and sometimes Sakura Show.

Unlike Sasuke, Itachi never received any visitors, chose not to interact with any of Sasuke's even when, occasionally, she could feel his chakra flicker with a tinge of recognition. She could see plainly that Itachi's place at the table had been set long ago; he just refused to take it. As someone left begging for crumbs, Karin couldn't help but resent him a little more for it.

After all, she didn't think it was an accident that more often than not she would find herself sitting between Sasuke and Itachi, acting as a barrier between the brothers.

"I intend to stay in the village," Itachi finally said, voice flat. It'd been the first thing he'd said to her since they arrived—one of the very few things he'd ever said to her. "The Hokage decided to make me an offer—absolution, so long as I do not leave."

He didn't even bother to speak directly to her, only stared straight ahead at Sasuke, who was so absorbed in trying to correct Naruto that Itachi didn't seem to be worried about being overheard. "As it is, I will live alone. On the outskirts of the village."

Karin glanced sidelong at him, trying to get even the tiniest clue as to what he was thinking. He still didn't bother to return her looks; not in the least because he was half blind.

He'd been on edge since they arrived in the village but he hid it incredibly well—aside from her sensing, the only hints she had were the too-straight way he sat, minute twitches in his fingers whenever the door at the end of the hall opened or shut. "What, you aren't gonna move in with Sasuke and Naruto?"

"You would be welcome to stay as my guest. Indefinitely, if you would prefer."

She was openly gawking then, because if there was anything less likely than her wanting to stay with him, it was _him_ wanting her to stay. Assuming he understood that well enough without needing it explained back to him, she shook her head. "Thanks for the offer, but Sasuke said Naruto would take me wherever I wanted to go. Anywhere on the continent. Seems like a pretty good deal if you ask me."

Itachi nodded, but the movement was stilted, awkward. Karin hadn't known him to be an expressive person but he'd at least put forth a slight effort then, which suggested he was, even if only a little, invested. "It could be." He paused and looked down at his hands, one wrapped around the other with the thumb pressed against the chakra seal across his wrist as if he were taking his own pulse, making sure he was still alive. Always so fucking dramatic. "But where could you go that would welcome you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" she'd hissed.

"I don't believe you have anyone else." He finally spared her the quickest glance before his attention was inevitably drawn back to Sasuke. "At least here, you would still have Sasuke. Sasuke's friends."

Sasuke's friends—people who gave her those damn pitying looks. People who only saw her as some kind of extension of Itachi, of Sasuke. It wasn't as if she expected things from Itachi, but she at least assumed he'd understand how shitty of an offer that was.

"Sasuke wouldn't care if he never saw me again."

"Well. Perhaps he wouldn't."

Karin shot him a glare; if he actually wanted to change her mind, he could at least put forth some effort.

Unless he just didn't think she was worth it.

"What about you?" she hedged. "What do you get out of this?"

"Convenience, mostly." He paused again, watching Sakura tug Naruto back from the bars by his collar, Sasuke smirking back at them both. She could hear a certain emptiness in his voice when he spoke to her—even in the middle of a conversation, he didn't even bother to offer her his full attention. "I would ask that you make certain contributions to the household."

She scoffed. "So that's it, huh? You think I'm gonna keep taking care of you? You want a live-in nurse?"

"I don't believe you have the qualifications to be a nurse."

Would it be too much, she wondered, to ask that he be even half as blunt as Sasuke?

Karin muffled a groan into her hands, but it was apparently loud enough that Sasuke could hear. He turned around, eyes darting back and forth between her and Itachi suspiciously. Sakura followed, another concerned crease between her eyebrows. Karin waited for them both to turn back to Naruto before she asked, "Is that a yes or a no? You could just answer the damn question, you know."

It was apparently neither, because he only shrugged. She could see the barest flash of his collarbone when he did, peering out under the too-wide collar of his shirt. "I would not ask you to pay any sort of rent, though when you go into the village I may have several errands for you to run—including any shopping or clerical tasks."

"You could have anyone else do that."

"Could I?"

"I'm pretty sure you don't even like me," she said instead, ignoring what was probably a rhetorical question to begin with. "Actually, the odds are pretty good that you hate me."

"I don't know whether it matters if I do." He shifted on the floor next to her, pulling one knee up. Getting comfortable, she thought. "Still," he added, absentmindedly toying with the seal on his wrist again. "I believe you and I might both benefit if you choose to stay here."

"I'm not gonna let you bite me anymore if that's what you think, so you—"

"I have no interest in that," he snapped back, much quicker. She could feel firm truth in it, could taste it like iron.

Except no, not like iron—iron was cold and impersonal, biting and sharp. What Karin could feel was hotter than that: a fuller, simmering indignation.

"What, does that bother you?" she goaded, loving the sudden heat in his chakra—all fire, no pity. Undeniable proof that he and she were both alive, that she was alive and she mattered. "You grossed out by it? It's not like you can even see the marks, can you? You can't even—"

"You may accept my offer or leave it. I have no further interest in talking to you." The heat in his chakra went to smoke, leaving a cold emptiness between them. Itachi closed his eyes and leaned back against the cement wall, his left arm tucked just under his ribs.

For all intents and purposes, he looked dead.

She stared after him but at no point did he so much as crack an eye in her direction. Ending a conversation on a weak footing wasn't in her nature, but there was no way to escalate a conversation like that without bringing everyone's attention back to them.

For once, she really didn't think she wanted that. She let out her frustration with a hot sigh and pulled back her legs, resting her chin on her knees. "Whatever."

At some point, Sasuke and Naruto had stopped fighting—the three of them were sitting in a rough circle by the cell door, Sasuke resting back on his elbows with his shoes pressed against the bars, Naruto flat on his back on the other side, arms crossed behind his head. Sakura was fussing with the soft ends of her hair, chatting absentmindedly about needing more free time, having to cut out portions of her skin care routine in balancing her work and her visits there.

It didn't matter that it was small talk, idle chit-chat—Naruto ran a hand through his hair and added a few spare comments about needing to get it cut and Sasuke, who rarely ever said more than bare minimum to Karin, was nodding along, offering short comments every few minutes to show he was still paying attention.

It didn't matter what was said or how they said it. The Sasuke she knew could give two shits about where she'd be spending the rest of her life, let alone face masks or haircuts. When they were Sakura's face masks or Naruto's haircuts, though, that somehow changed things.

Karin didn't know _how_ those things happened, how those kinds of bonds formed, but she knew that - somehow - Konoha was a place where they _could_ happen, and that was more than she could say about any other place she'd lived.

"Hey." She nodded to Itachi. "I'll stay."

"You and I will not speak any further on the past. Any part of it. Do you understand?"

"Yeah."

"Then you and I have an agreement."

In the end, she realized, Itachi was right: there was no one else, not a single soul on the continent, who was waiting for her.

In Konoha, she at least had Sasuke. Sasuke's friends. People she wouldn't call her own friends just yet but—but maybe that could change.

"To be honest," she tells Naruto now, looking up at the wall that surrounds Konoha like a cracked-open eggshell, cradling the village within it. The sunshine in Konoha is bright—almost bright enough to make her eyes hurt. "I don't know how long I plan to stay."

There are guards on both sides of the entrance but they're almost embarrassingly casual. One is turned around talking to someone, and the other is leaning against the side of the gate, stifling yawns with the back of his hand. She can sense the seals pasted on both sides of the wall, though, protection seals and tracking seals and seals whose purpose she can only guess.

Karin has no passport or shinobi license or identification of any kind, but she sticks close to Naruto, and together they're waved through the narrow gate leading into Konoha.

* * *

**A/N**: this was pretty flashback heavy, but i did want a little bit of something to have as a basis before moving further; there'll still be more filled in as i go along, but it's gonna move a lot faster from here on out.

I'm also considering adjusting the side-ship tags-sasuke and naruto are still gonna be paired together, but i'm tempted to ship all of team 7 together after writing sasuke and sakura together this chapter. still not sure, though, so stay tuned on that. the sakukarin thirst jumped out, im not gonna lie

Thanks to everyone who subscribes / reviews / favorites! i love you all deeply!


	3. Unpacking

"Just because you offered me a place to stay doesn't mean I forgive any of the shit you did," Karin tells former ANBU, renowned terrorist, and redeemed genocidal maniac Uchiha Itachi.

With the kitchen counter firmly between them, she announces, "I haven't forgotten what you did to Sasuke, and I haven't forgiven you for wasting almost a year of my life."

It's a gauntlet she's throwing down, she thinks. A line of demarcation—Karin is circumnavigating their relationship, circumscribing its edges. All she needs to to get there first, to draw her boundaries before he draws his. Even if he pushes back, tries to get her to budge on anything, she sets the tone by doing it before he does.

This is not quite what happens.

Itachi nods once distantly, without even looking at her, and says, "Okay."

As if that were all he needed to say, Itachi pulls back tape from one of the many boxes scattered across the kitchen counter and begins to remove stacks of dishes and silverware from it as Karin watches on, hands on her hips as she waits for a response.

Any kind of response, really. Just not that one. An _okay_ from Itachi is less of a concession and more of a rebuff—he isn't so much accepting or rejecting her terms as he is refusing to consider them at all.

She tries again. "So, that's where I stand! I'm not gonna be your buddy or your pal or anything. I'm gonna do my job, like a professional, and that's it! You got that?"

"Of course," he mutters, though his attention is clearly elsewhere—he holds one drinking glass up to the light, squinting at a hairline crack in its edge. He runs one nail along the crack and frowns when it catches on the gap. "That's unfortunate."

He pays her no further attention than that; instead, he continues to unpack bowls and plates, removing the newspaper wrapped protectively around them, and placing them all in a neat line along the counter. They're all mismatched hand-me-downs Sakura collected from her friends: lightly-painted ceramics and bright, glazed earthenware, plastics and tin cups and thick mugs with chips at their edges.

They're things that don't naturally fit together but, through odd misfortune and charity, are about to get packed into the same cupboards anyway.

After a moment, Itachi shoots her a brief glance, one fine eyebrow raised. "Did you perhaps intend to say more?"

"Ah—of course I did!" She has a lot to say - volumes, in fact! - but he gets in the way of it; she can't find her footing without him trying to swipe her feet from beneath her. "If I'm going to be sharing a house with you, there needs to be ground rules! An understanding of what's going on!"

"Hm." He's already back to Sakura's boxes, peeling back more tape on one marked _Pots and Pans_. "So then why don't you get on with it, then?"

She seethes, but settles for a calmer, if slightly tense, "Well, aren't we going to talk about anything that's happened so far? Any of it? Just to—you know, get it out of the way. Get it over with."

"Oh?" He has to be doing it on purpose—acting disinterested so she'll leave him alone.

"I'm not asking you to be my best friend," Karin tries, because she's never been the type to pray for miracles. "Or to be anything other than just around, which I don't even care about. But at the very least we should maybe just… Find some common ground here. Or something." _Stable_ ground, she thinks. A line so she knows just how far she can go before she crosses it.

"I was technically granted legal title to the house," Itachi says instead, "But you are welcome to treat it as your own."

"That's not what I was—"

"I don't particularly care to discuss anything else," he says. "If you recall, you specifically agreed that you would not waste my time or yours attempting to relitigate what's past. That ought to be it." It's as blunt as any dismissal she's ever received from Sasuke or Orochimaru, but somehow it's a lot harder to choke down.

Maybe because it's been a while since she's been given an order, and maybe she's not as eager to receive one as she'd once been. Maybe she doesn't give a damn about orders from someone who, just a month ago, was her prisoner.

Maybe because she needs to be palatable and soft to win over Naruto and Sakura, but she only needs to coexist with Itachi.

"We don't have to get into the dirty details of everything, I just think—"

"I find it very difficult to believe you have nothing else you could be doing at this moment. It seems to me as though someone who intends to stay here would have already started to unpack their belongings."

"Now you wait just a minute! I'm trying to—"

Itachi lets out a long sigh, and finally looks up at her, and lets his eyes linger. There's only the kitchen counter between them—they're close enough that he's almost right on the mark. Regardless of whether he can actually see her clearly, he's at least able to look her in the eye. "Karin," he says, "stop talking to me."

She does.

Itachi lifts a stack of dishes and carries them over the other side of the kitchen, turning his back to her. Aside from the occasional ceramic shift of dishes, the house is silent again.

Karin does not go to unpack her things. It isn't, after all, as if she has much to unpack to begin with—when she left the Southern Hideout, she took only what she could carry. She's always traveled light, been flexible, ready to do what her mother could never do and run when things started to look bad.

She hasn't ever actually run, regardless of how bad things have looked, but she's always prepared for the eventuality, and that (she thinks) is what makes the difference.

Unpacking, she thinks, would only make that more obvious.

Karin leaves Itachi to the room-that-will-one-day-become-a-kitchen and stakes a claim to the couch, laying back and propping her feet up on the arm. It seems like the type of thing that would piss him off, but even if it does he doesn't bother commenting on it. She stares up at the ceiling and Itachi's chakra is doing absolutely nothing—the hum of chakra in the floorboards is louder than his is.

Fine then.

Karin finds better things to do with her time: she thumbs through one of several books Sakura left for her, propping it up against her bent knees in case she needs something to hide behind. It's a medical text, marked through with tabs and highlights, enthusiastic rows of exclamation points. There are scores of her comments scribbled in the margins, things like _this was proven false_, or _Itachi responded well to this once—definitely something here. _

She's well-intentioned—so much so that it's almost painful to read. It's not the kind of healing Karin is used to; Sakura's is precarious, intentional work, where Karin has never had to concern herself with the finer aspects of it. She just does it. Or, more accurately, it just happens—regardless whether she's trying to make it happen or not.

Because of that, Sakura is capable of holding entire conversations with notes on the page, but it all seems so pointless that Karin barely makes it ten pages before she's sneaking glances at Itachi again.

He's just… boring. It's almost like he's _content_ to be shuffling around the kitchen putting away dishes. She knows, far better than most, that he's more than capable of high dramatics—usually deeply serious ones, but dramatics all the same.

Occasionally he'll rub his forehead absentmindedly or cradle one of his wrists, feeling for the places where his chakra suppressant seals had been placed. Now it's just plain skin, though his chakra is still returning in slow increments, trickling back honey-slow. Instead of trying to activate his Sharingan, Itachi feels his way around the cupboards and cabinets by touch, hands passing lightly over surfaces as if he were at risk of being burned.

It's another thing Sakura said she's still looking into—restoring his sight.

His body only holds up for a little bit longer. Over the top of her book she watches him stumble, steps uncertain, toward the table and drop down into a chair, closing his eyes and sinking his head into his hands. He's too low for her to see, but she can still hear his slow, complicated breaths. His voice has gotten deeper since she first met him—as much damage as his lungs have taken, she's almost surprised he can still talk at all.

And yet, not once does he look back at her. Not once does he ask for help.

That's his long-term plan, she supposes: he doesn't need her specifically, just someone who can pick up his groceries and run his errands. A line stretched as thin as possible from him to the village, leaving him in his quiet corner in the woods. She's just the poor son of a bitch actually stuck maintaining it.

There's too much and too little between them, she thinks; too much time, too little that's actually happened.

And yet, at the same time, that isn't entirely true either—a lot has happened, but not enough to have filled six months. She can hardly account for any change from the first time they met: there's a greater ease, perhaps, in how they speak, but six months is still six months—six months of three meals a day, six months of bathroom and shower breaks, occasional medical exams. Six months of laundry and scavenging for food, daydreaming and wakeful nights. Lying flat on her back in the middle of the day listening to water pump through the hideout's old pipes, waiting for the numbness in her arms to dissipate.

It's hard to view six months as empty, regardless of how little happened.

Six months was what, half a year? It's hard to put an exact number on it, to quantify the weeks of seeing no one but Itachi, of having no one to talk to but Itachi, but never actually talking to Itachi either. Digging into whatever wounds, emotional or otherwise, that she could find, twisting the knife when he wouldn't budge.

Never getting a response.

She can let those memories linger for the moment but they can't sit stagnant forever—they need to be unpacked eventually, she thinks, even if it's just taking them out of the box once in a while to look them over. Left alone, they gather dust, gather mold; that's a lesson she only needs to learn once.

No matter how few things she's carried with her, no matter how prepared she's ever been to run away, there are always moments when the world is too slow to feel dangerous. Moments where, alone in one hideout or another, there were no experiments or prisoners to feed her mind.

In moments like those, there's only so much that remains—in the quiet, in the night, the only things left for her are the things at the bottom of her mind. The things she doesn't unpack.

In the kitchen, Itachi finally gets up from the table and returns to his work, lining up mismatched cups and bowls in the cabinets, breaking down boxes as he goes.

.

.

.

For several hours, it's just the two of them. Karin leaves Itachi to his work in the kitchen and eventually goes out to sit on the back porch. The back door inexplicably has a deadbolt on it, which only makes Naruto's front door more incomprehensible.

She isn't out there long, however, before she senses an incoming chakra signature and scurries back through the back door.

"You can come in," she shouts, seconds before Sasuke can knock. "It doesn't have a lock on it."

"It—what?" Itachi is still in the kitchen, sorting through dish towels. "It doesn't…?"

"Sasuke!" She recalls, distantly, that she was maybe a little mad at him before, but sees no use in worrying about that now. Why stay mad at Sasuke when she could be happy to see him? When the only alternative she has is Itachi?

Itachi's greeting is much less warm. He nods once, politely. "Sasuke."

"Itachi."

And Karin, who can only introduce herself. "How was lunch? Are—is anyone else coming?" Just as she'd predicted, Itachi had no interest in joining Sasuke and his friends, though they'd almost definitely had a better afternoon than she'd had.

Sasuke shrugs, but doesn't look away from Itachi. "Sakura went to work. Naruto's still cleaning out his apartment."

"You should stay in the village. Those are the terms of your probation, are they not?"

"It's close enough to the gate that no one will say anything." Unsaid is that no one who isn't Naruto or the Hokage would dare to say anything to him. "I came to talk to you, Itachi."

"I see." Itachi takes a quick glance back at the kitchen. "Is it an urgent matter? Karin and I are still in the process of putting the house together."

Sasuke blinks. "It's—about the clan. I want to talk about the clan."

"Ah."

Karin takes a cautionary step back. If there's a fight, after all, she probably won't be able to avoid it, but she can at least get out of the line of fire.

(Still, though—if there's a fight, and she won't be able to avoid it, she's already picked sides. If Sasuke were around this time, if he could see all she'd do for him—maybe he'd think differently about ignoring her.)

"I want to talk," Sasuke repeats. "An actual conversation."

"And it's urgent?" When Sasuke doesn't waver, Itachi gestures to the kitchen table. "Then we might as well."

Their conversation has effectively become an Uchiha-only affair, which is fine.

Well. It's not fine exactly, but it's not far off enough from what Karin expected that she can say she's surprised. They have some shit to work and Karin is more than willing to let them figure it out on their own.

Like a good little person who intends to stay in Itachi's house, Karin leaves them alone in the soon-to-be kitchen.

Even if she can't personally be a part of their conversation, there's nothing to stop her from listening in, after all. It isn't like she's eavesdropping, since the house is so small she couldn't walk away from them if she wanted to. At least, not without leaving, she can't.

They know she's there—they just don't care enough to actually deal with her.

Sakura was kind enough to wash the few clothes she'd had before they left, so Karin goes into the single bedroom with her stack of fresh laundry and waits for the two brothers to get their shit together.

Sasuke, naturally, dominates the conversation, flying through more emotions in a single sentence than she'd felt from him in three years: anger, indignation, frustration, disbelief. Itachi had been, in some ways, lucky while they were in the ANBU cells because there was always something to get in the way of these conversations—meals or visitors or Karin, wedged between them. The reasons are practically uncountable—the twelve hours he would spend every night pretending to be asleep, the constant presence of guards.

"I deserve to know," Sasuke insists now, his voice echoing through the walls of the bedroom. "If I missed something, if there were things Danzo and Tobi didn't tell me—"

Itachi doesn't reply, his words bound up indefatigable stubbornness.

Well, there's nothing she can do about that. If there were anything she could do about Itachi—well, it would have been done a long while.

Turning to the task at hand, she gives the bedroom another once-over and finds herself unable to think of it as her bedroom and Itachi's bedroom, as_ their bedroom_. More importantly—the single bed placed in the middle of room, which neither of them have claimed yet.

He said she was welcome to treat the house like her own, but maybe there's more to it than that.

In theory it could be, in reality it probably isn't, and in her mind there's nothing to actually make it hers, let alone make it theirs. She hears Itachi sigh all the way from the kitchen and wonders if he's even thought that far ahead, or if he's been too preoccupied with the dozens of other things that come with making up a house and terrorizing Sasuke that he hasn't realized there's only one bed.

To be fair, there's been enough happening that she can't exactly fault him for one oversight.

Itachi only seems to become more uncooperative and less talkative as the evening wears on, only sometimes offering one-word responses and shrugs at the end of whole monologues from Sasuke. More often than not, Itachi offers no response at all but only sits there, probably staring off at something Karin can't see. The empty space on his wrists where his chakra seals had been, maybe—he drifts back to them a lot.

More likely, nothing at all.

It'd been like that when Sasuke had finally returned for him at the hideout—she'd warned Itachi that he was coming, expecting to see him finally crack or beg her or something. As he'd done then, now he only sits in silence, waiting for Sasuke.

Then again, at the time she'd also been expecting Sasuke to immediately finish off Itachi. Instead he'd sat down across from his brother and declared, _I know everything. Danzo told me everything._ He'd been unshakeable in that belief at the time, but apparently enough time has passed that Sasuke's faith has waned somewhat.

Karin still doesn't exactly know who Danzo is or was or what he knew, but she knows Itachi didn't so much as flinch back then, didn't waver a single inch despite the very real possibility that Sasuke was about to end his life. _He would've told you that I was a willing participant in all of it. I don't see what difference it makes._

_You don't see—what do you mean you don't see a difference? Itachi—I… I almost killed you. Don't you see how that's different? _

_Have you come to end this or not?_ Itachi had snapped, his voice finally taking on an edge to it—more than Karin had seen in six months. Rather than take that bait, Sasuke had shaken his head.

"I just want to talk," he says now, though she can't hear a response.

She can trace the outline of their struggles: betrayal, regret, and misunderstandings color all of their interactions. The fine details, though, are beyond her. Above her pay grade, she thinks wryly.

Sasuke's questions broaden her understanding of it in the same way an explosive tag broadens a forest—leaving only more emptiness in its wake. _Was—what was Mother's role? What did Izumi know? Shisui—you were lying about Shisui, I know you had to be lying—_

_What did Father think would happen to me, Itachi?_

If it weren't so goddamn depressing, it'd almost feel validating—Itachi doesn't give him the same dismissal he'd given her, but Sasuke doesn't get anymore of a response than she'd received.

For a while, they don't speak at all—Sasuke's chakra is flaring, though, flickering with determination.

She leaves them to it.

Karin sighs and finally walks over to the dresser, pulling out an empty drawer and sitting and folding her several pairs of shorts in her lap.

Touring the house, it had seemed stupidly small. It felt like far too cramped a place for two people as different as her and Itachi to live, but she's not exactly planning to stick around all day to keep him company, either.

Karin fits every other article of clothing she owns into a single drawer and is barely able to fill it. She peeks into the other three drawers and finds only two have anything in them, realizes there aren't enough clothes between her and Itachi to even fill a dresser. To fill anything in the house.

Except, of course, when it comes to the bed.

Karin eyes it suspiciously and decides, no. She values her life too much to even ask to share a bed with Sasuke's brother, even innocently. Not while Sasuke was still within sensing range. Within chidori range.

Except, would he really care?

Itachi, she's pretty sure, would just ignore her.

She gets up from the floor and, after thinking it over for a solid second, flops down face first on the bed, the spring creaking under her. She thinks that she should ask Itachi what his plan is so she can find somewhere else to sleep, but she'd much rather claim ignorance later just so she can see how he handles it.

She rolls over, and looks the room over again.

In its rawest form, it's plain—obnoxiously so. There are exactly four pieces of furniture: a bed, a bedside table, a dresser, and a tiny bookshelf that's depressingly empty. Maybe five pieces, if Karin counts a hanging mirror on the wall, but given Itachi's near-blindness she's certain the mirror is only there for her to use.

It's from Sakura, she assumes, because Naruto is so scatter-brained that he forgot to put a lock on the front door, and she hasn't seen enough of anyone else to think they'd care. So many of her and Itachi's shared belongings have come from Sakura—before she and Itachi had headed back to the house, Sakura had pressed two thick sealing scrolls into his hand and cheerfully said, _This should keep you two afloat for now! _

Neither of them have added any of their own personal effects yet, though she also doubts either of them have much to contribute.

She wasn't exactly expecting anything beyond a place to sleep and shower and maybe eat, but at the same time the house doesn't feel like anything more than a weird mosaic of chakra.

Her mother's house—that was the closest she's thinks she's ever come to what a home ought to feel like. It was hers to keep, after all, paid for in blood and tears and chakra, filled with no one's belongings but hers, maintained by no hands except for her own. It wasn't in particularly great shape when she'd left it, especially not compared to the rest of the houses in Kusa, but it'd been _her_ house, and that had counted for something.

She supposes that in a sense she's also paying Itachi now, but occasional grocery shopping seems a pretty nominal cost compared to what she's paid in the past. No sense complaining about it when it works in her favor, though.

"Putting up with him, though, that's actually going to take effort," she mutters.

Having nothing else to do, she rifles through the rest of the bedroom and finds several folded blankets in the bedroom closet and steals a pillow from the bed, reasoning that she's entitled to at least these things, that she'd be using them even if she wasn't sleeping in a different room.

Neither of Uchiha so much as acknowledges her when she steps out of the bedroom, even though they've been at it for at least an hour. Probably longer. Karin drops her blankets on the couch and picks Sakura's book back off the coffee table, and Itachi's silence continues uninterrupted.

Surprisingly, Itachi is the first to break: when the sun begins to set and the room darkens, his eyes drift to the windows and he sighs. "There is nothing here for you, Sasuke. You'd do best to return to the village before it gets any later."

"Don't think this is over." Sasuke doesn't budge until Itachi finally stands, slowly and deliberately. "I'm coming back tomorrow, and the day after if I have to."

Itachi walks Sasuke to the door. Once their backs are turned, Karin tosses Sakura's book, and pulls the blankets off the side of the couch and begins to shake them out.

Their relationship is weird. It's so fucked up that _weird_ is about the only thing she can say about it. Almost a year ago Sasuke was willing to drag Karin and the rest of Hebi around the continent to kill Itachi, and now he's standing on the crooked concrete steps of their house with his hands in his pockets, deliberating several moments before he mumbles, _have a good night, I guess,_ and heads off toward the village without once acknowledging her.

Itachi closes the door when Sasuke leaves and she finally sees his shoulders relax, hears him let out a slow, calming breath, as if Sasuke were a burden he's relieved to finally have off of his back.

He runs his hand through his hair but stops halfway, his body straightening. She senses his attention swing back towards her for a brief second, but when she turns to look he's facing the kitchen, avoiding her.

Well. She supposes there's a chance he isn't intentionally avoiding her, but the outcome is the same.

Karin turns away and finally drops her blankets on the couch, spreading them out into something that at least resembles a sleepable surface. She isn't planning to make a fuss about sleeping on the couch. There isn't really room for another bed, and she isn't going to push her luck more than she already has that day by bugging Itachi about sleeping arrangements.

(Later, when she's moving on ground that's a little more stable, she will absolutely bug him about it.

She… just isn't there yet.)

Itachi's footsteps fade into the would-be kitchen and now she knows he's watching her, can feel the uncomfortable prickling sensation on the back of her neck but she pointedly avoids looking back at him. She cracks her knuckles then fluffs the pillow she commandeered, smoothes out the creases in her blankets even though they're already straight, only wants something to do with her hands. Wants an excuse to keep avoiding him.

Besides, it's not like Itachi can see well enough to call her out on it.

At least, he can't call her out for that specifically.

Instead, he walks around the kitchen counter and back into the living room, leaning against the counter's edge to keep watching her. "Karin." It's a brief acknowledgement—a verbal nod in her direction. "What are you doing?"

"Are we talking now? I didn't think that was a thing we did."

He's firmer the second time. "Karin."

She pivots. "I was about to go to bed." As if to make her point, she turns around to sit on the couch. She adds, "if you were planning to stay up, it won't bother me," to try to end the conversation as fast as she can.

At this point, it's a survival tactic—if he wants someone to beat up after getting verbally beat up by Sasuke for however long, she's the only person left.

"You're sleeping on the couch." Like most of the things he says, it comes out without inflection, without a hint of emotion to taint it. Nothing to give her any goddamn idea of what he's actually trying to say.

She sighs inwardly but nods her head slowly. It's important, she thinks, because it keeps the conversation calm, keeps it light, but it also helps since he can barely see her. "Um. Yeah."

"There is a bed in the bedroom."

"Yeah. A bed. Like, one. A single bed. For one person." Itachi doesn't respond but furrows his eyebrows, doing his best to maintain eye contact with her. Not for the first time it occurs to her that he might not have thought this far ahead, that when he decided to invite her to stay with him, it meant he'd have to deal with the unbearable ordeal of having her physically present.

He's barely a few feet away but even at that distance she knows he can't make out all the details of her face. He can see, roughly, where her eyes are, but he's just slightly off, looking to the corners of her eyes or just over them instead of dead on.

Itachi opens his mouth and then pauses, like the single working gear in his brain has somehow started to malfunction. There's something here he can't quite process, but something deeply rooted in his psyche that insists he press on. "You are my guest."

"And what, you won't talk to me, but you'll let me have the bed?"

"It is my house, and you are my guest." Maybe it's meant to be an offer of hospitality, but it sounds a lot more like a threat. "Furthermore, you're a woman," he adds, as if that were something that mattered.

"But it's _your_ house," she counters. "And it's not like you don't need the bed more than I do. You can't even stand up for an hour without getting lightheaded." If it's a pissing contest he wants, she'll piss twice as far as he does—she'll piss everywhere except the bed and the couch. "What, were you actually planning to crash on the couch? You're like half a foot taller than me; I'd like to see you try."

"I've slept under more difficult conditions." It feels like a challenge to her, as if he's daring her to contradict him.

Karin meets the challenge head on. "Well, so have I. Worse places than you, I bet."

She spent years working under Orochimaru and, as strange as he is, Itachi isn't enough of a pain in the ass to make an honest-to-goodness couch with cushions and blankets worse than rocky floors and straw mattresses.

"We could… share the bed." His mouth is at a slant, as if he can't even fully commit to the suggestion. "If it is necessary. We have shared other things."

Maybe he's thinking of the hideout, of sharing the same general living space. Still, Karin's hand instinctively slides around her arm, protecting the crook of her elbow where she has dozens of rings of scar tissue matching the exact patterns of Itachi's teeth, irregular, stuttering lines where she'd forced them into her skin. Most of the scars he left are nearly indistinguishable from the others by now, but she knows where they are, knows the feel of each individual scar.

Even the newest ones have faded away to waxy pink skin by now, her healing slowed by the continual drain on her chakra, and the fact that he had to be so fucking difficult about it.

Itachi watches her, his gaze analytical even if it isn't entirely on point. He doesn't comment.

His chakra should tell her more but it doesn't. It rarely tells her anything and it's absolutely infuriating: Itachi has an iron-clad control of his chakra—he can't hide his lies or his jutsu or shield her from his most intense emotions, but in a moment like this his chakra is blank. Impossible to read.

Maybe he wants her to be embarrassed, that he somehow thinks he can shame her for what she's done to him, as if she's another person so Konoha-soft that she'd really fold under that kind of pressure. It's almost a flattering thought—that she's close enough that he's willing to lump her in with the rest of them.

He ought to know better than that, though. Not even a month ago she was making him sleep on the floor of one of Orochimaru's abandoned hideouts for no reason other than spite.

_If you think this is bad,_ she'd told him once, watching him writhe in the midst of another coughing fit, not even bothering to roll him over onto his back to let him breathe, _just wait until Sasuke comes back to end you for good._

"For someone who was so insistent on having a conversation, you're being unusually thoughtful."

Karin flushes. "Well you can't just drop that on someone out of the blue! Maybe you can just throw out a suggestion like that, but some of us would actually think through that kind of thing first!"

At the very least, if he isn't trying to fuck with her, he should know damn well the difference between her holding him prisoner and the two of them _sharing a bed_.

It's not even a large bed. It wouldn't give either of them the space they'd need to avoid the other, and Karin can't think of something either of them would want more than a good foot or two between them.

For as blind as he is, she really doesn't think the difference is all that hard to spot.

"What happened at the hideout was different," she finally says, and it's a weak response. Something she's only saying to fill the silence, to turn the conversation back on him. "We were never… we were never that close before. Not enough to warrant—to warrant doing something like that now!"

Itachi's face slips, cracks, and then hardens into something that almost looks frustrated. Annoyed. "It was my intention to suggest we share on an alternating basis, Karin."

"Huh?"

He stares at her as if she were actually an idiot. "I was not suggesting that you and I sleep in the bed at the same time."

"Oh." Karin clears her throat. A second passes, and she slips one leg over onto the couch, leaning back on her arms. She tosses her hair back over her shoulder and pulls off the most casual-looking shrug of her lifetime. "I knew that."

Itachi doesn't look convinced. "I do not mind this living arrangement," he starts, "so long as there is no significant intrusion into my personal space. A host ought to be accommodating to his guests."

Karin snorts. "Yeah well, I'm fine with the couch."

"So be it," he says. He finally turns back into the kitchen, rummaging through boxes until he pulls out several candles in glass containers. "It may be a day or two until there is electricity."

Realistically, she should probably let their conversation die with that. Still, she's curious and apparently stupid enough that she can't help but ask, "Why are you making this harder for him?"

"Pardon?"

"Sasuke. You're making this harder for him, and it's pissing him off." At least, it should be pissing him off—Itachi clearly has answers Sasuke wants, and he clearly has no desire to share any of them. "He already said that he wasn't gonna try to kill you again. Seems like you're better off trying to get along with him unless you want him to change his mind. All he wants is information."

"Sasuke has decided, for the moment, not to complete his revenge. That's fully within his discretion."

"And so what, are you gonna tell me that if he changes his mind you're cool with that?" It's either so obviously wrong that he doesn't bother to deny it, or, somehow, she's right. "Just answer his damn questions and he'll leave you alone." Except—it's never that simple, is it? For all the things she _doesn't_ know about Itachi, she knows he's at least as calculating as she is, and that there's almost certainly more than what she's seeing.

"Unless that's what you want, huh? If you don't tell him anything, Sasuke will just keep coming back—as long you know things he doesn't, you're valuable to him." His lifeplan has obviously had some drastic overhauls lately, so why wouldn't his strategies change too? "You've actually got a chance of outliving whatever the fuck is wrong with you now, and you're making sure he _can't_ kill you."

That's how she'd play it, after all—when your life was in another person's hands, you needed to ensure it was worth more than whatever satisfaction your death would bring. That's just basic strategy.

She doesn't immediately get a reply. Itachi looks down again, rearranging the candles on the counter. He turns one over, feeling the rim of the glass. It's really starting to get dark now, but he doesn't light it. It wouldn't take much—for something as simple as a candle, any level of katon would suffice.

She wonders if he's still capable of even that.

He takes long enough to respond that she ultimately expects him to shut her down again and tell her to fuck off, but he inexplicably decides to entertain the thought. "Do you truly believe that?"

"What?"

Itachi shakes his head and places the candle back on the counter. "Do you truly believe that Sasuke would leave if I were to answer his questions? Almost certainly, the opposite would happen—having the answers he wants, Sasuke would only want more. Making him aware of how little he knows will only encourage him to return here, whether or not I have the answers he wants. Sasuke's imagination will only convince him there is still more for him to uncover."

There's a second-long pause, and then he adds, "Sasuke was only useful to me when he was pursuing revenge. If he no longer wishes to do so, then I have no further use for him, and he is better off remaining in the village."

Something finally sparks in Itachi's chakra and it's gorgeous, the most beautiful thing she's felt in days. "You're lying," she says. It's almost too good—that she's caught him lying to her. "You're lying about that!"

He cocks his head back at her. "Am I?" Without waiting for an answer, he shrugs. "So then what is the truth?"

"Ah—" _Dammit_. He'd said a lot—far too much for her to parse out a single lie. Finding a lie was one matter, the truth is something else entirely. "Something in there—there was a lie."

Itachi places the lid on the candle he'd been holding, and walks off toward the bedroom. "Perhaps. Have a good night, Karin," he says, though she doesn't feel particularly warmed by it.

.

.

.

Itachi sleeps with his door shut, and Karin lies awake for almost an hour waiting for him to finally fall asleep. To see if he will ever fall asleep. Just for the heck of it she'd like to feel it—she was nice enough to let him keep the bed, after all. It'd be damned nice if he actually used it.

With no electricity, and no matches Karin can find fumbling in the dark, there's not much else she can do once the sun finally goes down. She watches shadows play across the walls when the wind blows, and wonders what their plan is gonna be if someone comes in through their unlocked door. Tomorrow, she thinks, or whenever Naruto shows up next—someone will have to fix it, after all, and it might as well be him.

She wonders again if Itachi's actually going to sleep for a change, but dozes off before she can find out.

* * *

**A/N**:

Every night i go to bed full of regret that i dropped "anything you can say in the sunlight" on my first itakarin fic. I love that fic, dont get me wrong, but damn… that title was so good. That's all I wanna do with these characters, you know? Open them up and get all of the nastiness out in the open and then figure out where to go from there. Itachi was just... a lot this chapter! Karin felt, oddly enough, in a better place to me in this chapter compared to the last one, but i feel like letting her have an argument with someone always puts her in a livelier mood.

A tiny, not super important note—I sometimes refer to them being together for six or seven months—this flip-flops, mainly because I don't see it as a neat amount of time. It's somewhere in between; on the whole, the exact amount of time isn't significant, so long as I'm not confusing you guys too much! Occasionally Karin will refer to a year—in that sense, she's taking into account the extras—the time spent traveling, the time in prison. Lemme know if things aren't clear, though!

Also I deadass cannot explain the missing lock on that door or why i keep writing about it. It was gonna be a throwaway kind of thing but then i was like... well we can't just forget that? there's a missing lock on their front door?

As always, thank to everyone who is reading and commenting! And following and favoriting! I'm not the fastest but I'll do my best to be the lovingest person on here!


	4. Outsider

Karin wakes up to Sasuke.

That is, she wakes up to Sasuke, Naruto, and Sakura messing around with something in the kitchen.

Karin leans up on her elbows and squints, more aware of their chakras than she is actually able to see any of them. It's been a long time since she's been able to sleep so soundly with so many chakra signatures moving around her. Almost, she thinks, longer than her memory can stretch.

In a previous life it would have meant waking up to a kunai pressed against her throat, a vulnerability in a place where she absolutely could not afford to be vulnerable.

But when it's Sasuke and his friends… Karin tells herself that it isn't something she needs to be worried about, regardless of how disconcerting it feels.

On the other side of the counter, Itachi is already awake and sitting quietly at the kitchen table, his chakra unusually lax and unbothered.

There's still a wary alertness to him, like he's primed for things to immediately go to shit, but it's a far cry from how tense it'd been last night when Sasuke had visited.

Maybe—well, maybe Sasuke is a lot easier for him to handle when Naruto and Sakura are there to distract him. To control his worst urges.

"Naruto, can you hold up the basin for a second? No, you have to hold it still. That means not shaking it, Naruto. Okay, now Sasuke, you drilled some holes in the bottom earlier. Try to match those holes in the bottom to the holes you made in the wall, and then you're gonna have to fit a screw to each." It's Sakura's voice, recognizable even when Karin's brain is still half-scrambled from sleep.

Karin fumbles for her glasses and finally gets a good view of Sakura and Sasuke standing next to each other in the kitchen, where Naruto seems to actually be making good on his promise to install a sink.

It isn't a spacious kitchen by any means, definitely wasn't meant to be one, but Sasuke and his friends fit neatly into it, as if it'd been made for them, and them alone—Sakura is partly bent over the counter, scanning over a scroll. Sasuke leans over to read something over her shoulder, close enough that—that they have to be touching somewhere: either his chest and her back, their hips, some place Karin can't quite pinpoint—

"Right here," Sakura says, tapping the scroll. If she's fazed at all by how close Sasuke is, she doesn't show it. "Just look out for where the pipes will need to go."

"Right." Sasuke lingers next to her for a moment before he bends down next to where Naruto's bright yellow hair sticks up. It's a slow, thoughtful pause—the kind that could mean absolutely nothing at all, but almost never does.

The sink basin jerks, and Karin hears a loud sigh. "What, Mr. Sharingan can't find a little hole in the wall? My arms are getting tired, Sakura! Tell him to hurry up!"

Sasuke sighs. "Hey, Naruto? You can kiss my ass."

"Why don't you kiss _my _ass instead?" There's a pause, followed by a loud metal scraping, and another loud sigh from Sasuke. "It's a nice ass, isn't Sakura? Nicer than Sasuke's, I bet!" The kitchen counter blocks Karin's view of the rest of Naruto, but out of the three of them his voice still somehow manages to be the loudest.

"Can you two stop being so immature?" Sakura sighs. "You know, I'd expect that sort of thing from Naruto, Sasuke, but you both obviously spent too much time around that Suigetsu…"

Just as Karin is beginning to think she and Sakura might finally have something to bond over, Naruto laughs. "But he was so much fun, Sakura! And when Sasuke can leave the village again, Kakashi-sensei can assign us missions with him and Juugo! We can all go together!"

"Yes, because that's _exactly _what I want." Sakura shakes her head, but she's smiling now. "It would be nice to see Juugo again, though. I'm sure he gets sick of being all alone with Suigetsu." She deliberates a moment, then leans further over the counter, closer to where her teammates are. "What do you think about that, Sasuke? We could—I could put in a vacation request at the hospital, and maybe the three of us could go somewhere."

Sasuke grunts indifferently. He's tinkering with something—Karin hears a small shower of metallic _pings _as he works. "Suigetsu said he planned on traveling for a while. He isn't the sort to plan too far ahead like that."

"Well, Kakashi-sensei could always—" Before Sakura can finish, there's a loud clattering when something metallic - a toolbox, maybe - clatters to the floor and spills.

"Ow! Can you watch where your elbows are going Sasuke? You almost took out my eye! We need to make sure this kid is eating more, Sakura! His bony elbow almost just blinded me!"

"Well don't just sit there, Naruto, help him clean it up!" Sakura shakes her head. "Honestly, I just—oh! Dammit, Naruto, you woke up Karin!"

"Did I?" Naruto pokes his head up above the counter, already grinning. "I did! Good morning, Karin! You know you sleep like the dead? We've been here for like two hours already!" Naruto manages a quick wave with the wrench in his hand before Sasuke elbows him back down.

"Hey, _idiot_, hold up the damn sink!" Sasuke snaps, but Naruto claps him twice on the back and stands, presumably leaving Sasuke to hold it in place himself. "_Naruto—_"

"We're patching up the sink hole, Karin!" Naruto's eyes go wide. "Sasuke, did you hear that? It's a _sink_hole, like a—"

"How about you come down here and say that, Naruto?"

Naruto laughs off Sasuke's comment and fixes Karin with another grin, one she can't help but find suspicious. "Did Sasuke's brother really make you sleep on the couch?" he asks in an innocent faux-whisper, as if Itachi isn't literally sitting across from him.

Naruto has never seemed like the type to actually think too much about what he says, which is why he turns back to Itachi anyway and adds, "And after Karin looked after you for all those months, Itachi!"

The most Itachi offers is a slight twitch of a finger around his tea cup, something so subtle that Naruto obviously doesn't notice.

"Funny you'd mention that," Karin says, "because I mean, he did offer to share the bed with me."

Sasuke's chakra jumps at that, thrumming with a prickly unease that, maybe, is just a little bit satisfying.

Naruto cackles. "No way! That's like something Pervy Sage would pull!"

Behind his back, Sakura and Sasuke share a long look, something unreadable passing between the two of them.

Sakura eyes Itachi next, low and suspicious. It's a lot more than just an offended glare—her eyes linger for a while, and Sakura's chakra, like Sasuke's, quickly grows cold.

Naruto turns around. "Hey, Sasuke, did you know—"

"Naruto." Sakura's voice is firm and cheerless, almost severe. "Are you gonna help us finish putting in the screws or not?"

"Oh, well yeah, but—" Naruto scrunches his nose. "Can't you do that part?"

Sakura huffs, and there's something sour in her chakra that Karin doesn't like, something that feels dishonest. It isn't unusual for Sakura to boss Naruto around, but there's something pointed in it—something deliberate. "Come on, Naruto; we don't have all day to be here! Some of us have jobs, you know."

Naruto backs away from the counter with a sigh and kneels back down next to Sasuke. "I've been down on my knees all morning," he complains, but he dutifully takes the wrench Sakura offers to him. "Heh."

With an ease that's almost eerie, the three of them fall back into their work. Sasuke gives Sakura a grateful look before he squeezes back down under the sink. Naruto settles in next to him and begins to hum quietly and just slightly off-key. Even he seems somewhat conscious of the change in mood, and neither he nor Sasuke attempt to revive their earlier banter.

It feels like a show, and Karin feels very much like an audience to it.

Sakura offers a few short comments as the three of them go along but her attention is strangely split, her eyes and her mind working in different directions. She probably thinks she's being sly, but Karin is no green genin, and she's more than aware of Sakura's side-eyes and sneaky glances.

It's… more than a bit of an overreaction. Karin is aware enough of the way things work in Konoha to understand how an unexpected innuendo could kill a conversation—that Sakura or even Sasuke could be caught off guard by a racy comment.

Karin just can't help but think there's something more that she isn't picking up on.

She's always had an awareness of things that has singled her out, that gives her an advantage over others. It only takes one of Sakura's well-meaning little glances for Karin to realize how _deeply _she resents being caught on the uninitiated side of things. Sakura's eyes aren't challenging, but they aren't particularly communicative, either—they don't settle in one place but scan Karin's face, her neck, her shoulders. It's impersonal, like she's assessing Karin for something.

Karin just plain doesn't like that—any of it. Whatever Sakura is imaging, whatever she and Sasuke think is happening, Karin wants no part of it.

She scowls and tosses her blankets off, stalking over to the empty bedroom. She closes the door softly and locks it behind her, not once looking back to see if Sakura is still watching her.

Even that isn't enough, though. A thread of worry in Sakura's chakra still manages to pass right through the locked door, clinging to Karin like a tiny hook. Karin grits her teeth.

She isn't… if Sakura is so worried about Karin, of all people, she's either stupid or prone to overreacting over stupid shit. Sakura has no idea what it would actually take to—to actually hurt her, or even make her uneasy.

Sakura's lived in Konoha her whole life; she just wouldn't understand it.

Well, presumably she wouldn't. Sakura and Sasuke—Karin just can't imagine she's something the two of them would bother to talk about, not when they had any number of other things they could be talking about instead: their vacation plans, the missions they're undoubtedly planning together, _Naruto_…

Itachi.

Sasuke being angry where Itachi is concerned isn't a novel thing by any stretch of the imagination, but Sakura—she doesn't usually bother with Itachi at all, except when medicine is concerned. That's not enough to explain the almost sinister way their chakras just… plummeted at what seemed to be a slightly off-color joke.

There was something they both had simultaneously realized or imagined that still somehow went over both Naruto's head and her own.

Karin sighs and rubs her face, setting her glasses askew. That's definitely a problem, but she's got a slightly more pressing problem in the meantime, one that's roughly the size of the gaping hole in the soon-to-be-bathroom bathroom where the other sink and shower are supposed to go.

She can already hear Naruto's voice—_Oh yeah, don't worry! We'll get right to it!_

"And that dumbass would mean it too."

Karin sighs again and starts to sort through the short cabinet where - she can only assume - they'll be installing the second sink. Whoever stocked it did a decent job, and again she assumes it was Sakura: there's generic bottles of soap and shampoo, two hair brushes and toothbrushes, a bottle of mouthwash… Hell, if she had running water, it'd be downright luxurious.

Especially luxurious considering that for the last months she'd been at the mercy of the fickle pipes in the hideout.

Knocking open the windows in Itachi's bedroom, Karin takes a quick swig of mouthwash, prays no one happens to be looking out of the kitchen window, and spits it out in the grass.

That's the last thing she needs—Sakura catching her spitting up fluorescent blue mouthwash into the weeds in the backyard.

Maybe it's just how Konoha trains their medic-nin, Karin thinks as she wipes her mouth off on the back of her hand. Sakura is primed to look for injuries, to find a way to make herself useful. A valuable skill on the battlefield, even if it's a pain in Karin's ass now.

It doesn't have to be anything more than that, though. She just needs to find a way to convince Sakura not to worry so much about her.

How she'll get there is a bit of a mystery, but it feels like a good starting point, a goal that's finally obtainable to her: she doesn't have to make the incredulous jump from _stranger _to _friend_.

She just needs to find a way to become something better than a victim.

In the kitchen, Sakura continues to order Naruto and Sasuke around and, in spite of whatever weird shit is going on, Itachi is still there, lingering mindlessly in his own corner. Karin combs her hair and picks out clean clothes while Naruto begins listing off restaurants to Sakura and Sasuke, repeatedly asking them to pick a place for lunch, it's his treat, he's tired of choosing—

She still doesn't hear a single word from Itachi, but that's nothing new.

Maybe he's onto something with that. He keeps to himself, doesn't bother anyone, and yet people still come back to see him—Sasuke comes back to see him.

But still, that doesn't just _happen_. As tempting as it sounds, she can't afford to just ignore them like he can, because there's nothing they want from her. Nothing she can tempt them with or withhold, nothing that would stop them from forgetting her entirely if she let them.

Unless you were someone like Itachi, ignoring people only got you ignored in turn. Even now Karin just happens to be lucky enough to occasionally be caught in the crossfire between him and the rest of the world.

The kitchen sink is still only partially attached when Karin slips out of the bedroom, and Sakura is in the middle of a long and informed-sounding description of whatever seal Naruto will be applying to connect them to the village's water supply.

Sakura only momentarily slips when she sees Karin walk out of the bedroom. She recovers quickly and continues to describe, to no one in particular, how the sink should work just fine once it's all put together.

It sounds like complete nonsense to Karin, but Itachi's chakra is alert and unbothered enough by it that Karin assumes it's not something she'll ever have to worry about.

At least, she won't need to worry about it once the damn thing is finally finished.

Naruto and Sasuke pack up their tools by the sink, crouching over a long scroll. Sasuke noticeably backs away each time Naruto completes a seal, bracing himself for whatever might go wrong.

Naruto waves him off. "See, it isn't as hard as it looks! I think I'm actually starting to get the hang of this," he tells Sasuke.

He places his hands down on the scroll, and for a moment nothing happens.

"Well that's odd," Naruto says. "What if—"

Before he can finish, the seal activates, spitting out a heavy cloud of inky black smoke.

Naruto wheezes and tries to swat it away with his hands.

Sasuke snorts, but even he can't keep down the tiniest sliver of a smile. "You dumbass," he mutters.

"You're going to hurt someone one of these days messing around like that, Naruto!" Sakura scolds. She huffs and starts rolling up her own scrolls, slipping them neatly into the pouch at her waist. "Have you even looked at any of the scrolls I brought over for you? I carried them all the way from the library, so at the very least you could—"

"Sakura! You know I—" Naruto pauses, and Sasuke offers him a raised eyebrow. Naruto snickers. "Well, I kinda skimmed them a little. But I did read some of them! I just—" He scratches the back of his head. "It's just a whole lot of words, Sakura."

"Well—" Sakura sighs. "I'm glad you at least tried."

The bedroom door clicks lightly when Karin finally shuts it behind her, but it's soft enough that neither Naruto or Sasuke seem to hear. Sakura notices, though; her head jerks up just in time to catch Karin still staring at her.

Sakura's expression softens, and she offers Karin a gentle smile. It's so kind, so genuine that—that Karin just can't help but hate it.

She just doesn't _get _it, and the disconnect is so frustrating that Karin's mind can't stop picking at it. She hardly knows Sakura, has never once talked to her about anything that didn't involve at least one Uchiha, and yet—and yet…

And yet Sakura just can't mind her own damn _business_.

Sakura folds her hands over the counter and waits patiently for Karin to say something, which just makes Karin spit out the first half-intelligible thing that comes to mind. "So, there's no running water just yet, right?"

It's a weak way to start a conversation, but she has a strong suspicion that Sakura is more than willing to pick up her slack.

Sakura's eyes brighten, though Karin can tell it takes her an extra second to process what she's actually said. "Well! Hm… Not yet, no. Naruto brought a few jugs to tide you both over, but…" Sakura trails off.

"Oh." Karin clears her throat. "I mean, I was hoping I'd be able to, ah, take a bath or a shower. Or something. You know."

Sakura's chakra floods with relief. "You can use my shower, Karin! I…" Sakura hazards a quick look out the window and grimaces. "I have to cover half a shift in a little less than an hour, but I could always—"

Naruto's head jerks up from his scroll. "What about lunch?"

"Well, I was hoping we could be quick about it, but if Karin needs to—"

"Karin could come with us! And Itachi could come too!"

Sasuke hums. He's been quiet so far, but he nudges Naruto with his elbow and says, "Didn't you say something about treating us to lunch? You gonna pay for them too?"

"Oh." Naruto's bubbly good mood, for lack of better words, bursts. "I guess I did say that…"

Sakura sighs, and she gives Karin an apologetic smile. "I'm only supposed to work until six; you can come afterwards if you want, Karin, and—and if you don't feel comfortable walking around the village in the dark, you could always stay with me for the night." Sakura adds that last bit hastily, and doesn't wait for Karin's response before she starts giving her instructions. "You can meet me right at the hospital; usually I'm not able to get out right at six but if you don't mind waiting a little I promise—"

Naruto ties the tie on his scroll with his teeth, and slips it into one of his pockets. "Well, come on! If we only get an hour for lunch we gotta hurry!"

"Less than an hour, Naruto! _Less_!" Sakura's face softens when she turns back to Karin, almost apologetically. "Come by around six, okay? Let me…" She looks around the counter before tearing a strip of paper off of a brown bag of groceries and grabbing a pen from her tool pouch. "Let me write down some quick directions so you can find the hospital… It's a larger building but if you've never been in Konoha before…"

Karin is almost definitely going to get lost around Konoha even with directions, but maybe it's better that way, that she can face Sakura when they're both alone, and maybe get some answers out of her.

"There!" Sakura folds the note carefully, and gives Karin a bright smile when she hands it over. When Karin doesn't immediately take it, Sakura presses it into her hands, holding them tight. With one final, supportive squeeze of her hand, Sakura pulls away.

"We should hurry, though," she tells Naruto.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you!" Naruto whines. He huffs, then stalks out the front door. "Old man Ichiraku is gonna make us sit on the ground; I just know it!" he calls back.

"Naruto! You can't just—sorry about him," Sakura says, "he's just—you know."

With that, Sakura nods a quick goodbye to her, taking one last careful glance at Itachi before she takes off after him.

Sasuke watches them both go. He's still crouched on the floor where he and Naruto had been working, but something is still keeping him. He stares down at his hands thoughtfully, doesn't seem committed to anything in particular—his chakra is unusually contemplative.

Itachi is the one to finally speak up—Karin had almost forgotten he was there, and she almost startles at the sudden sound of his voice. "It's rather discourteous for you to stay when your friends have already decided to go," he comments. It may very well be the first thing he's said all day for how rough his voice sounds. "In fact, it seems as though you're interfering with rather time-sensitive plans."

Sasuke shakes his head before he stands to leave, apparently shelving whatever thought he'd had. "You're just playing into their hands, Itachi."

With that cryptic as hell remark, Sasuke walks out and lets the door slam shut behind him.

It's not the warmest kind of goodbye, but the house still feels colder when he leaves.

As quick as that, it's back to her and Itachi again, complete silence settling around the house like a film of dust.

She isn't particularly interested in changing it. Instead, Karin follows Sasuke and his friends' chakras into the woods, halfway to Konoha. Naruto is hurrying ahead of them both, but Sasuke and Sakura catch him easily, falling into a comfortable sort of rhythm.

She looks back at Itachi. He's starting to tire out, she thinks—he's been resting his eyes for the last several minutes, and by her estimate it's just barely past noon. Whatever has him so fucked up is something deeper than just exhaustion, more than simple exertion. His chakra input is so weak that she can barely sense it, as soft as a single spray of perfume from three rooms over.

If only to break up the painful silence between them, Karin begins to clear off the counter, wiping away traces of sawdust and leftover crumbs from whatever Sasuke and his friends had eaten, bringing some kind of order to a place that already feels more like Itachi's than her own.

When the counter is clean and her hands are still twitching, Karin digs in her pocket until she finds the note Sakura left her. She's planning to find her by her chakra either way, but part of her wants to look through it anyway, to start building a mental map of the village.

It takes her more than a second to read through it, though, because Sakura hasn't given her directions at all—at least, not to hospital.

_If you need somewhere safe to go while I'm at work_, the note reads, _go to Yamanaka Flowers and ask for Ino. Tell her I sent you. It's a small shop, five blocks away from the Hokage Tower heading toward the gate. Don't be afraid to ask for directions—anyone should be able to find it._

Of all the stupid, goddamn things to write…

Karin is too prudent to tear the damn thing apart, but she crumbles it into a ball and shoves it back into her pocket anyway.

"So… which of them showed up first?" she asks Itachi, who still hasn't budged from his spot at the table.

He has a cup of tea waiting for him, one that's probably gone cold in the time it's been sitting there. It's a milky tea—light brown and sweet enough she can smell something floral in it when he gives it a half-assed stir and taps his glass to shake off excess drops.

"I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean," he eventually replies.

"Were you stuck with Sasuke again, or did all three of them show up together?"

His brows furrow. "Why do you want to know?"

Karin gives him a half-shrug, leaning back against the counter casually. "I mean, things seemed pretty civil when I woke up; I feel like it wouldn't be like that if Sasuke came all by himself."

"Ah." He nods slowly, as if he were thinking over her words. "You did mention having difficulty sleeping last night," he comments. It ought to be small-talk but it doesn't sound at all like it.

He's as unreadable as he always is, his face completely straight.

If anything, it feels like a trap. Karin laughs nervously. "Ah. Well, the couch is actually okay, you know." She hesitates for a moment, then adds, "Apparently I was able to sleep through all of their business, so…"

"I had assumed."

"Uh… Yeah. You probably did…"

"Whatever you had intended with that comment of yours, I'd ask that you don't try it again."

"I wasn't—" Itachi gives her a _look_, and Karin crosses her arms. "Like I even care. Naruto was the one who made a big deal out of it. I was clearly fucking around with him."

"Obvious to you, perhaps, but not to them."

"Whatever." She waves her hand in frustration. It does occur to her, though, that Itachi might have better insight into whatever the hell his brother had been so concerned about. "I don't know why Sakura had to be so awkward about it; she didn't strike me as that traditional."

His lips thin into a straight line. It's a careful line, though, and his words are equally as careful. "I imagine it had less to do with propriety, and more to do with your lack of care in making innuendos."

"Yeah, well I'm pretty certain Sakura would know better than to think you were out here trying to get an innocent girl like me into your bed."

As expected, Itachi doesn't quite find that as funny as she does.

Without responding, he pushes his cup away and slowly eases himself up from the table. His eyes go hazy for a moment when he stands, and his chakra plummets fast enough that she steps away from the counter, unsure if she's going to have to catch him.

It seems like a staggering amount of effort for something so simple and she can't help but wonder if this is something sustainable—if he's really capable of staying out here for however long he's planning to stay alive.

Itachi rights himself, and hobbles toward the back door.

"Looks like you could use a hand," she says, but of course she doesn't offer him one.

The sound of the backdoor slamming shut is her only answer.

.

.

.

Karin had never thought she'd find herself missing the hideout. And, well, maybe she doesn't miss the hideout exactly, but as she pokes around the house, looking in half-filled cupboards and pulling back the corners of neatly tied scrolls, she finds herself missing the loose structure of it.

Of course, she hadn't really seen it that way at the time; it'd been work, a job like any other, but there was a grating, reliable repetitiveness to it. She'd been stuck there for months, but empty time leaves only empty memories.

When she thinks back to it, it feels like it was endless, but there are so few specific memories she can conjure.

Work and survival had been synonymous in Oto. People survived as long as they could work. As long as they were, by some measure, useful. Usefulness, though, was a matter of branding more than anything else: there was a careful balance to strike, and leaning too far in either direction made you a target. You had to make yourself too useful for Orochimaru to kill, but not so useful that someone else would kill you to eliminate the competition.

It took a while at the new hideout, maybe more than a month, before it finally occurred to her that no one was watching her anymore. Even in the Southern Hideout, hundreds of miles away from Otogakure proper, there'd been no escaping the feel of eyes on the back of her beck, the need to constantly prove her work had merit and that her existence was valuable.

In the new hideout, there was no one left who cared. No one to complain or even notice if she slept through lunch, no one to bother her if she stayed in bed until it was time for dinner.

Not even Itachi.

Some days she'd ignore him entirely just to see if he'd speak to her, withholding food and water and whatever comfort her presence might have brought so that once - just once! - he would say something to her. Anything at all.

There'd been no harm in it, she'd thought. If he was going to die either way, why not use him to fill up all of the time she was wasting anyway? There was almost something novel in it, even—he seemed to accept, just as easy as she had, that he would be dying when Sasuke returned.

With no hope of escaping and no hope of surviving, she thought he'd eventually make peace with it, and condescend to talk to her.

It never quite worked out that way, of course. Looking back, she thinks she might've been giving Itachi one of the only things he actually wanted—solitude. Peace. She'd always break before he would, begrudgingly stabbing open whatever cans she'd scavenged and leaving them for Itachi to figure out on his own.

The only time she'd get anything out of him was when she needed to heal him, and even then—well, all Itachi has ever given her is resentment and a messy collection of scars, and she's had more than enough of both in her lifetime.

Hell, she's been back in Konoha for weeks and the scars he'd left are still more fresh than they ought to be, soft and pink when she presses her thumb against the inside of her elbows.

Now, standing in the kitchen and poking herself is all she can do to pass the time: there are no locks to check now, no halls for her to pace.

Pacing the house isn't quite the same: it'd been easy to ignore when Sasuke and his friends were around but now, barefoot and almost entirely alone, she's again aware of the eerie presence in the floorboards, the lingering chakra that tickles the bottoms of her feet as she goes back and forth between the kitchen counter and the couch where she'd slept.

Sakura's note seems strangely ironic in the wake of it: the closest thing to a crisis she's experiencing is an existential one. The name _Ino_ rings a few bells, but Karin can't put a face to the name, much less figure out if she's someone Karin can visit casually or without a good excuse.

Itachi is still there but… but he doesn't need her checking up on him or making him food, and he almost certainly doesn't want it. She doesn't even have to worry about him getting away when there's nowhere left for him to go.

The only problem is there's nowhere for her to go either.

She has no money. She doesn't know Sakura or Naruto's friends.

She does have one other resource, as much as she dislikes the thought of it. She supposes she might as well use it.

Cautiously, she pokes her head out the back door. Itachi is sleeping, or whatever it is he does that passes for it.

He has his arm tucked into his chest like a broken wing, propped up by nothing in particular. It's a weird habit of his, she's noticed—he always seems to sit as if he's incapable of getting comfortable, no matter how much he tosses and turns.

For a second she wonders if she shouldn't just leave him alone—she can't imagine how long it's been since he's had a decent night of sleep, since he definitely never got one on her watch. If napping on the back porch in the middle of the day is how he plans to make up the difference, he probably won't take too kindly to her bugging him.

Then again, if all he wants to do is sleep, that's something she has to hold over his head. There's no harm in a little arm-twisting, she thinks.

"You know you've got a bed for that, right?"

For a moment there's nothing, but Karin waits several seconds before Itachi's chakra finally stirs and he responds, "Yes."

It's a single word, but somehow still enough for her to want to breathe a sigh of relief. She supposes that's one thing she's gained in leaving the hideout: she can actually talk to Itachi and expect a response.

"I'm gonna head into the village early and take a look around."

"Fine."

"Anything you want me to check out? Or bring back?"

"No."

"Not much going on out here." There's a forest, of course, but there's nothing interesting about it—it's too big, too empty. Itachi's got nowhere to go that isn't Konoha, and he isn't going to make it much farther than that in the state he's in. "You're still looking a little pale around the edges. Better make sure you aren't in the sun for too long."

"Noted."

She can't exactly say his indifference is unexpected when she can barely squeeze a drop of interest out of him on a good day.

Thankfully, Karin is an expert at keeping things alive, if only just a little bit.

"Naruto and Sakura left some more scrolls and groceries on the counter. I fussed with them a little but figured you already had a place for everything."

That time, Itachi doesn't say anything at all but gives her the barest of nods. He hasn't so much as cracked an eye at her yet, which makes her think she might as well get to the point.

"You know, you're gonna run out of stuff to do real quick if you keep at it." She closes the door behind her and crouches down next to him on the porch, close enough that even he'd be able to see if he'd bother to look. "Doesn't that bother you?"

"I don't suppose you're going somewhere with this."

"You're gonna get bored real quick, and I know something we can do for fun." She cuts him off mid-sigh. "Hear me out! If I'm your link to the village, wouldn't it be better if we started, you know, making some connections? You've gotta have old friends around here. People who might wanna hear from you? Who might wanna help you out?"

Itachi might as well actually be sleeping—he barely even stirs. "You're already looking to start trouble."

"I'm looking at the village where I'm gonna be spending the next couple months, unless you've found someone else who's gonna stay here and put up with you."

In truth—in truth she can't say what exactly it is she wants, but whatever it is, she's hungry for it.

It feels like fresh air in her lungs, like opening the windows of her mind for the first time in months. There's a whole village within walking distance—she just needs to find a way to fit herself into it. "I'll do all the heavy lifting; all you gotta do is tell me where to go. You know what's going on, who the important people are, and I can get in and out without being noticed. It's perfect."

"Certainly you can find other ways of keeping yourself occupied, Karin."

"I'm going there whether or not you help me." Feeling fairly certain that their conversation is going to be a longer one, Karin lets herself sit properly, letting her legs hang off of the porch.

Itachi isn't a stranger to the way she lives—there's no need to lie about what she needs. "I don't have grudges to pick here, but I've gotta find a foothold somewhere."

"If you're planning to stay here long enough, you should have no reason to be so impatient. Surely you of all people wouldn't have trouble finding someone sympathetic to you."

She snorts. "But why waste my time doing that? Even if you just give me one name—I mean, Konoha is a big village. That's a _lot _of time to waste picking through strangers."

When he shrugs that off, she tries turning it back on him. "What about Sasuke? You only know what he does cause he comes here and tells you. What happens when he moves on? When he starts going off on missions?"

Nothing.

"It's gonna be hard when they stop coming here. If you get your way and Sasuke stays away altogether, you're just going to have to assume Konoha will take good care of him." She lets that sink in for a moment. "How much do you trust Konoha, Itachi?"

"I trust that Sasuke can look after his own interests."

"But what if he doesn't?" The odds of that happening with Naruto and Sakura behind him are slim enough, but the possibility is tempting. More importantly, it's dangerous. "I'm not asking a whole lot here—you just tell me where the gossip is good. I'll do my own thing, and anything that affects you or Sasuke, I'll report back to you. We both win."

Several long, grueling seconds pass in silence before Karin swallows her own pride and tries yet another angle. "We already know that nobody in the village cares who I am. Even if I cause trouble… who is gonna care? You're not in the village; it isn't like you're gonna lose friends over it. And if you would—I mean, just tell me who not to piss off. Sasuke can't be all you've got left. You were gone for what, ten years? More? You had to have—"

"No."

"What do you mean, _no_? You've gotta know somebody."

Finally, Itachi lets out a long sigh and brings his hands up, rubbing slow circles. When he opens his eyes the bags underneath them are clearer and darker, more firmly set. "You are nobody here, Karin. Perhaps you ought to think more of it."

She narrows her eyes. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Itachi shifts, straightening up his posture. Getting comfortable, though comfortable seems like a lofty goal for him. "You are nobody, and that is your greatest strength. Your greatest advantage." He gestures vaguely with his free hands. "Konoha is insular, fixed—once you find yourself sorted into a role, your options will be greatly limited." He shoots her a quick look. "You are no fool. Think on it a little more and you'll come up with something."

"All you're saying is that it should be _harder _for me to get to know people," she argues. "Even when people hate you—that's a platform. When you're an outsider, people just don't care at all."

"Perhaps." He tilts his head up, looking up at the sky. They spent so much time underground that her eyes had smarted when they'd left, not fully adjusting to the sunlight until they were already several miles on their way toward Konoha.

She wonders if Itachi had the same problem—if the light is still as bright as it used to be.

He sighs. Before he even responds, she already guesses that he's tired of being quasi-useful. "Perhaps I am only thinking out loud, and perhaps it's about time you went on your way."

Karin grits her teeth, but decides she's wasted enough energy on him. "Well, you have fun with, uh, whatever you're doing out here then," she says. She looks back up at the sky—she's got until the end of Sakura's shift to get to the village and start digging around. No sense wasting her time here either if she's not going to get anything out of him that isn't vague philosophizing. "Guess I'll see you around."

* * *

**AN: **Karin stop being so GAY

heh

See this has been making me laugh because I absolutely struggle to write SakuKarin when I like, actually try to write SakuKarin... and then something like this happens, and it feels very neat? Now, I don't think either of them are attracted to the other, and Sakura is pretty into Sasuke here, but... hehehe.

Depending how I end up cutting up the next few scenes, there may or may not be more Sakura & Karin next chapter.

As always, thank you to everyone who review, favorites, or follows quietly from the shadows-I would kith all of you if I could! Special thanks to Elskara, who listened to me rant about this fic and hopefully didn't let me ruin her enjoyment of it in the meantime!

I'm listening to Free Bird rn.


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